We use Looker for database BI. It’s similar to Tableau, and is a service that hooks into your transactional database to give you visualizations, graphs, etc. The amount of discovery it allows is fantastic, and we’ve used its modeling layer to transform our transactional data into data that’s more digestible by business analytics. Much of our proactive customer service is enabled by automated Looker reports that are triggered off of customer behavior patterns.

We’ve been using in-house solutions to date, but they’re coming up insufficient when it comes to integrating with our other systems, like email list, mobile list and all of our web and messaging applications. We’re now looking to bring on an out-of-the-box solution, and strongly considering Looker as a visualization tool, on top of a centralized data warehouse like Amazon Redshift.

Once you begin to ask more nuanced questions--like if you want to see a user who has used the app six times in the past month, has 15 connections on the product, and you want to see three things about that person--for that you might need a service like Looker. We've explored Looker a little bit, and it provides really robust analytics insight into these very specific questions you want to answer. We were told about Looker by someone at Venmo--they used it for evaluating why a design change led to people making mistakes or duplicate payments.